The first scrapbook I ever completed happened because of the most traumatic event of my young life.

I was nine and goofing around with my best friend Loyal at his house. He grabbed his older brother's golf bag and we both went out to the vacant lot behind his apartment complex. Taking the biggest club out of the bag, he teed up the ball and took a swipe. I have no idea if he even hit the ball, but he clearly connected with my forehead on the follow through. I'll never forget the sound of the impact.

Nothing like that had ever entered my mind before.

My skull fractured and bleeding profusely, I slapped my palm over the open crater in my head and ran to the back door of his apartment screaming, leaving a trail of blood in my wake. His mother Doris and my sister, responding to the agonizing screams, met me at the door. When I removed my hand to show them both what had happened, I knew I was in trouble from the look on their faces.

Because my Mother had just left town to attend a conference and my Dad was still at work, Sis and I were under orders to go directly to Loyal's house after school so that we would stay out of trouble.

That worked well.

So Doris grabbed a washcloth, slapped it on my head and put me into the back seat of her car with my head laying on Sis' lap. With Loyal riding shotgun, Doris took off for the nearest hospital.

Then it got really interesting.

Upon arriving at the hospital, they were kind enough to put a temporary bandage on the hole in my forehead but they refused to admit me because no one thought to write a note for Doris giving her permission to treat life threatening head injuries in case both parents were not available.

Since Mom was out of town at the conference, (this was day one of her absence, by the way), everyone was busy trying to find Dad so he could authorize treatment. He normally would have been just arriving home from work, except that he decided to get some new tires on the way home.

Did I tell you that this happened in 1969, before cell phones?

Still conscious and alert, my biggest fear was getting stitches. But no one was listening to my pleas to "Just put a Band-Aid on it!"

Hospital personnel inquired who my pediatrician was and believe it or not, I knew it was Dr. Johnson. When contacted by telephone and apprised of the situation, he said to take me to another hospital where he worked and he would accept the responsibility for having me treated. So we piled back into the car and drove to St. Francis Hospital, another 20 minutes away.

Still worried about the pain of receiving stitches (what did I know? I was only nine) I remember being taken to a room, getting dressed in some funky hospital pajamas and getting into a bed. No emergency room like what you see on television nowadays.

They gave me something to knock me out because the next thing I remember was waking up the next morning and being fed Jello.

I ate a lot of Jello that week. In fact, I got really tired of Jello. Get me a hot dog or some pizza, please. No, here's some more Jello.

I was told afterwards that a plastic surgeon was summoned to put my forehead back together the best he could. And when I next looked in the mirror, one quarter of my head was shaved and -- yup, you guessed it - eight of the biggest, meanest, ugliest black stitches you ever saw running from my hairline to my eyebrow above my left eye. And they didn't hurt one bit.

To help pass the time, Doris brought me a scrapbook with a faux leather cover and gold printing that said "Scrap Book." Inside, a good half inch stack of tan colored pages to decorate anyway I pleased.

Doris had saved the temporary bandage completely saturated with blood from the first hospital visit. So that's what I put on page one, along with a clipping of hair and my plastic hospital ID bracelet. I thought it was the coolest page of all.

Would you believe no one took a photo of me? Not one! So the remainder of the scrapbook is filled with cards, letters and pictures I drew. What a boring week. No TV!

Besides having sustained the worst childhood injury of all my siblings, there was one more thing that makes this story immortal in the annals of family history.

Dad held off telling Mom about the incident until she arrived back home from the conference three days later. His reasoning was he didn't want her to worry. When he met her at the train station she asked how everything went. Always one for understatement, his response was "There's been a little mishap. Paul's in the hospital."

She never forgave him for that.

I never questioned where Mom was for that three days. I knew she was out of town at a conference. But when she entered my hospital room on Thursday when she got back, I burst into tears from the joy of seeing her again.

I never fully understood the seriousness of the injury until I got much older. Had the impact of the golf club been one inch lower, my eyeball would have exploded. Two inches further around the skull would have been a direct hit on the left temple and probable death.

Though faded after 41 years, the scar is still visible as well as the dent left behind in my skull. And I still have that scrapbook with the bloody bandage on the first page.

1. Saves Time

As in all things digital, there are many ways scrapbooking digitally saves you time.

If you're really lazy or think you can't even combine two elements without messing something up, you can buy pre-made pages with spaces for your photos and journaling and just drag and drop your pictures onto the page.

Printing your pictures before you put them into your scrapbook pages is no longer necessary. Just download your digital camera pictures to your computer.

No need to spend hours going from one store to another looking for the right color paper to go with your daughter's Easter dress. Shopping the Web is faster or you can create your own paper. This also eliminates those unwanted 2-year-old tantrums in the paper aisle of the local store.

Everyone I've spoken with that's made the switch to digital says they love how much faster they can complete pages.

2. Saves Space

For some traditional scrappers, the idea was whoever dies with the most supplies wins. Setting aside a permanent corner, room, basement or annex for your supplies was a way to beat your husband at his game of collecting tools.

The only physical space required in digital scrapbooking is for your computer, scanner and printer. The other "space" requirement is the size of your hard drive in your computer. Digitized images do take a lot of megabytes of drive space, but have you seen the price of hard drives lately? You can get a 500 gigabyte drive (that's 512000 megabytes) for under $100 these days. Check out Newegg.

Many digital scrappers also like the fact that printed digital scrapbooks are just like any other book. No bulky pages filled with buttons and ribbons.

3. Clean and Tidy

This is the natural result of number 2. With all of your supplies on the computer, there's no need to physically sort through all of the punches, paper, ribbon or other embellishments you might have lying around. No worries about leaving a project partially done and laying out where junior can spill a soda on it or the dog eats it. No need to get supplies out on the dining room table only to put them away later so you can serve dinner. Just be sure to click save and don't leave your computer screen where someone can accidentally delete your work.

Another benefit along with this is you'll find more opportunities to work on your pages without worrying about the time and hassle of setting up before and cleaning up after.

4. Saves Money

Let's assume you already own a computer. Cost of software such as Adobe Photoshop Elements is $75 - $100. You can get a free 30-day trial of Elements here.

Digital scrapbook kits usually go for around $5.00 to $7.00 and have lots of paper and embellishments included. The equivalent in physical paper and embellishments costs $20 to $35 and are "consumable" meaning once you use them, they are gone. Digital kits can be used over and over to your heart's content.

Once you learn how to use your digital scrapbooking software, it's not hard to create your own supplies if you feel adventurous.

Oh, and saves a lot of gas money too since there's no need to spend hours going from one store to another looking for the right color paper to go with your daughter's Easter dress.

5. Waste Proof

This naturally follows number 4 because you can literally re-use any digital scrapbook element as many times as you like. No more buying extra paper to avoid running out of a certain pattern or color. No more keeping piles of leftover paper scraps. Imaging starting each new project with a complete new scrapbook kit. With digital scrapbooking, you can.

6. Mistake Proof

The most precious items in your scrapbooks are your photos. So why take the chance of butchering them with scissors. With digital scrapbooking, there's no worry of ruining the only photo you have of Great, Great Grandpa. Scan the photo and make as many copies as you need. Resize and crop as many times as you like. Don't like it? Back up a few steps with the Undo function or start over.

Ever place a sticker on a page and didn't quite like it? Oh well, it's stuck on the page now. Digital scrapbooking allows you to experiment with a multitude of possible combinations until you get it just the way you want.

7. Photo Manipulation

Restore vintage photos to make them look just like new. Take current photos and purposely make them looked aged. Remove the red eye in that otherwise perfect candid shot. Get rid of ugly facial blemishes (the proverbial pimple in the Prom portrait) or too much sweat making the face glisten. Crop, enlarge, tint, age -- there are so many options to make your photos even more attractive, you'll be absolutely amazed. Photos you thought were hopeless are given new life.

8. Easier to Share

Ever create a scrapbook page only to duplicate it once again for your mother? Not anymore. In addition to being another time saver, digital scrapbooks can be shared so easily in so many ways. Print multiple copies of your completed books to share with family. Upload pages to your family blog. Email pages to relatives wherever they live. Use the same digital template for multiple photos. Get the idea?

9. Archival Quality

Remember when everything had to be acid free? First it was the paper, then the sheet protectors, the inks, the glue. Then came all the embellishments. Were they acid free too? Wait a sec...with digital scrapbooking, everything is acid free because there is no ink or glue to mix with your photos. Everything is preserved digitally either on your computer hard drive or on CDs or DVDs. Print as many copies as you need as often as you like. Not only is this archival, but keeping extra copies of your photos digitally either in a fire-proof safe or in a second physical location is the best way to ensure against your keepsakes being destroyed by a disaster such as a fire.

10. Unlimited Styles

With traditional scrapbooking, you're limited by whatever paper you can find in your local store or on the Web. Even then, you might find a pattern you like but sometimes the color isn't quite right.

Not a problem with digital scrapbooking. It's so easy to adjust the paper color from one hue to another so you can always match your daughter's Easter dress perfectly.

11. Makes Anyone an Expert

So what if your handwriting looks as bad as a doctors prescription. That's what computer fonts are for...to make you look like a professional calligrapher. But the best part is, there's no commitment, so if you misspelled a word in your journaling, you're free to go correct it without damaging your layout. Cropped photos always have perfect edges and text is always straight. Using a computer to scrapbook brings out the real artist inside you when you don't have to worry about making mistakes.

12. Trendiest

Scrapbook paper manufacturers use designers to create a new line of products. Then they decide which designs go into production. From there, retail buyers decide how much of the line to carry in their stores. By the time you get around to shopping, you're lucky if the product is in stock and in the right color.

Digital paper is not limited by any of the above. There's a multitude of online purveyors of digital scrapbook kits and there's no waiting for the product to hit the store. New designers don't have to have a big company behind them to sell their own designs. You get the trendiest designs and they are guaranteed to always be in stock.

13. Flexibility

Try this exercise: Take a piece of pattern paper and attach a photo. Now add some ribbon and some journaling. Now go back to the pattern paper and change it to another style to see if it will look better. Can't do it? You can when doing it digitally. That's what layers are for. It's like making a big Dagwood sandwich and deciding you want relish instead of pickles after the sandwich is already built. With layers, you can change any element on the page at any time.

14. Professionalism

Sure we like homemade stuff, but if we can make it look professional, it makes us all the more proud we created it. Submit your digital scrapbooks to printers like Viovio to have them professionally printed and bound. Then show everyone how talented you really are.

15. Versatility

Take any design you like and turn it into just about anything you want. Change the opacity to make it look like vellum. Tweak the colors to add a little more blue or red. Increase the color saturation or decrease it. Change it into anything you desire.

16. Endless Supplies

Never, ever run out of the letter "S" when using a sticker set again. And always have it in the right size, color and style. With digital scrapbooking, you will never run out of supplies again.

And who know, maybe you'll start designing your own paper lines.

17. Easy on the Furniture

No more hammering eyelets! No more dents in your oak dining table. Enough said.